From Joshua Green at Bloomberg:
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the House of Representatives to Democrats’ fortunes over the next four years and beyond...President Obama has already begun raising money for Democratic House candidates in hopes that his party can wrest back control in 2014 and make the last two years of his presidency as productive as the first two.
...Another factor—a brand new one—is whether the Obama reelection team, which engineered such a decisive victory against Mitt Romney, can work its magic on the congressional level...The first test case will be a guy named Ro Khanna, a 36-year-old Indian American technology lawyer with whom Obama’s staff is smitten. On Tuesday, Khanna announced his race for Congress in California’s 17th District.
...
...But the biggest reason is that the whole Obama campaign apparatus—the grassroots organizing, the data analytics, the wired-to-the-hilt technology—will be applied at the House level. If it works, the plan is to expand this to other districts, including Republican-held ones. This would, in theory, give Democratic House candidates the same leg up on Republican House candidates that Obama had over Romney. It might be enough to win back the House...
http://www.businessweek.com/...
(Bolding by diarist) (h/t cosette for fair use corrections)
The decision to go all in like this, D-Day style, leads me to believe that President Obama has no expectation of working out a 'Grand Bargain' with the Republerthals. He intends to wait until Dems retake the House, so he can then strengthen the social safety net, not cut it. Hopefully, he'll be able to get tons of other stuff done, too!
Update 1:
Awesome nerd update from Campaigns & Elections:
Organizing for Action signs up NGP VAN
by Sean J. Miller / Apr 05 2013
The consulting world has been waiting to see what President Obama’s campaign does with its data and technology from the 2012 race. On Friday, there was the first indication of how it plans to shift its resources into partisan technology firms.
Organizing for Action, the latest incarnation of OFA, will start logging all of its outreach efforts using the Voter Activation Network software and database. It's the first sign of a shift of OFA’s resources -- specifically its software choices -- to VAN, which means that innovation at OFA could be portable to the Democratic campaign world via VAN integration.
...
Looks like this Death Star is fully operational! Sweet.